"A Sanctuary in the City… Living Faith"

Come join the conversation! Each week, one of the pastors will reflect upon and ask questions of the focus texts for the upcoming Sunday’s worship. We invite you to read, reflect, and engage. Ask your own questions, or provide your thoughts on ours, in an email to the author if you’d like. Scripture is meant to be engaged in community, as we seek a way toward living our faith.

Creating Family

This picture is from the Jesus Mafa interpretation of biblical stories (Jesus inviting children to come to him). We have a series of these prints hanging in our church hallway. This week, in worship, the Lectionary gives us the story of Hagar and Ishmael in Genesis 21:9-21. Through this story we reflect on being family.…

God is Our Refuge and Strength

Amid anger and fear felt in so many ways, after vandalism and tear gas the night before, as a car and, later, homes would burn about fifteen blocks from our church, we lit one of our old Christ candles and kept vigil for love and justice and peace to settle in hearts and on streets of our city

Home Blessings

We’ve centered our lives wherever we call home, now, for weeks. We live more deeply into places familiar, with patterns upset, discerning new routines, seeking meaning, purpose, relationship. Walking a labyrinth can center us into God’s presence through reflection on twists and turns of life’s journey. As COVID-ian twists and turns continue to evolve in…

Invitation to Enjoy

This is what I miss most of our life together pre-pandemic. I am every bit as busy (or more!) than I ever was, but those moments of silliness, of shared laughter, of small talk, of shared pieces of life are harder to come by.

Daily Prayers

In these days, when typical routines which structure our day seem to blur or disappear, we might begin to feel disoriented – in heart and mind, if not actual time. Throughout our Christian heritage, people have tried to frame each day with practices of prayer—like portals into the next stage of our 24-hour journey—seeking to remain every oriented by Holy Love within and among us. What follows is a sort of simple rhythm in the spirit of Benedictine practice. Of course, if we find them useful, we can personalize these prayers in whatever space or precise moment we pause and open to God’s presence..

..So that you will be a blessing

One of the first expressions of covenant promise in scripture comes when God calls Abraham and Sarah to set off on the journey to a foreign land, where they will settle and begin new life. God charges and promises: “Go from your country and your kindred and your family plot to the land that I…

Blessings

I am thinking about blessing this week. How we receive and offer blessings to other people we know intimately or meet casually in the course of a day. Here’s a quote I’ve been mulling, from To Bless the Space Between Us by John O’Donahue: “A blessing … touches that tender membrane where the human heart…

Passing By

One congregation member remarked that she has come by to sit in her car and meditate on this artistic piece hung on our church exterior for all the world passing by to see. She cherished how she and her husband exited on their wedding day through former doors where this piece now hangs. In this…